Olympic swimmers learn from Sharks
May 19, 2008
When winning an Olympic gold medal in swimming is the goal, it helps to take inspiration from some of the best swimmers in the world — sharks and dolphins — and that is exactly what U.S. Olympic team swimmers have been doing as they train.
From suits to strokes, coaches, researchers and other advisers are making sure that their athletes benefit from fish and marine mammals’ natural swimming abilities.
“Some of our athletes are now wearing what are called ’shark skin suits,’” Russell Mark, biomechanics coordinator for U.S.A. Swimming, told Discovery News.
“These aren’t made of actual shark skin, of course, but they are slippery in feel, like sharks, and they make the wearer move faster than normal in the water by reducing friction and drag,” he explained.
Mark also indicated that excelling at the dolphin kick can make or break a swimmer’s race.
From Discovery News: Read more
Arctic ‘Monster’, the Greenland Shark
May 14, 2008
Canadian fish scientists are opening a window into the mysterious world of the Greenland shark — the top predator in the Canadian Arctic about which almost nothing is known. Except this, says Steve Campana of the Bedford Institute of Oceanography: “These are very, very strange sharks.”
Its meat is poison. Its mouth is far under its body. It has almost no spine. It’s so lethargic that it doesn’t even snap at the scientists who hook it and attach a radio to it.
And it may live 200 years.
“The sharks are incredibly abundant”, says Mr. Campana, “and yet we don’t have a clue how fast they grow, how old they get, where they give birth, how many they give birth to…” The researchers are hoping that samples of bone may hint at the age, using the 1960’s testing of nuclear weapons and searching for radioactive elements.
Growing to a length of eight metres, it cruises along the bottom of the ocean floor taking it’s meals of fish and seals. It’s not known if the seals are already dead when they consume them or if curious young ones have ventured too close to the slow moving shark, no one really knows. The Canadian researchers have tagged the sharks and will record data and then will ‘pop off’ the sharks in a few months and be radio their findings via satellite.
Only one other big shark in the world is almost unknown — the extremely rare deep-ocean “megamouth.”
From DiveNews: Read more
Shark attacks in perspective
May 8, 2008
Last friday morning a 66-year-old swimmer was attacked and killed by a shark off Solana Beach in San Diego county. It was the first fatal shark attack in San Diego since 1994.
While the attack has received widespread media attention, fatal shark attacks are increasingly rare relative to the number of people participating in ocean activities. In 2007 human deaths from shark attacks hit a 20-year low, according to statistics released by the University of Florida.
The single death of a swimmer in the South Pacific in 2007 represented the fewest casualties from shark attacks since 1987, when no one was killed by sharks.
“It’s quite spectacular that for the hundreds of millions of people worldwide spending hundreds of millions of hours in the water in activities that are often very provocative to sharks, such as surfing, there is only one incident resulting in a fatality,” said George Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack File housed at UF’s Florida Museum of Natural History. “The danger of a shark attack stays in the forefront of our psyches because of it being drilled into our brain for the last 30 years by the popular media, movies, books and television, but in reality the chances of dying from one are infinitesimal.”
From Mongabay.com: Read more
Hammerhead in need of protection
March 14, 2008
Over-fishing and demand for shark fins, an expensive delicacy, have pushed one of the world’s iconic animals towards the brink of extinction, say experts.
The scalloped hammerhead shark is to be added to the official endangered species list this year, under the heading “globally endangered”.
Their plight has been discussed at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting.
It was told that enforcement of marine reserves would aid shark protection.
The observation takes account of new research that shows hammerhead and great white sharks patrol fixed routes in the ocean, gathering at hotspots to mate or feed.
Dr Julia Baum, a marine ecologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, US, and a member of the World Conservation Union (IUCN), said excessive fishing was putting many of the ocean’s “most majestic predators” at risk of extinction.
Speaking at the Boston meeting, she said: “Sharks evolved 400 million years ago, and we could now lose some species in the next few decades – so that would be just a blink of an eye in evolutionary time.”
She said conservation concern for sharks had been mounting for several years, and it was now critical that there was effective management action in order to restore and conserve their numbers.
